With the advent of in-line sensing technologies, it has become more and more common that color marking systems are able to gather information about image quality (IQ) defects and utilize that information, for example, to improve their image quality performance. The success of these technologies relies heavily on the timely availability of the information of image quality defects. A full characterization of the entire color space for a given image quality metric, such as mottle, graininess, banding, and temporal color variations requires a large number of printed patches. For many applications, it can be prohibitive to print and measure all colors of interest to build a comprehensive image quality performance database over a target device's entire color gamut.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated systems and methods for determining image quality performance for any color of interest based upon measurements obtained for a small number of single-separation colors.